Windsurfing
Windsurfing is a recreational, family friendly sport, most popular at flat water locations around the world that offer safety and accessibility for beginner and intermediate participants.
The court eventually ruled in favour of Tabur Marine as they saw that although Windsurfing International’s design was slightly different it was Pete’s original that had all the main parts that are familiar today.
Innovation allowed for the development of high quality lighter and stiffer planing short boards, introducing foot straps, harnesses and more stable sails.
These innovations further expanded the sport by making it faster, more radical and more exciting for the top end, and significantly more accessible at the entry level with lighter easier equipment.
After some lean years in the 2000s, the sport has seen a steady revival, first through the explosion of foiling.,[12] and more recently with global consolidation, restructuring, and an exciting new unified World Tour.
Early accounts suggest island peoples were undertaking day trips over oceans standing upright on a solid board with a vertical sail.
[22] In his own words, Darby experimented throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s and it was not until 1963 that an improved sailboard with a conventional stayed sloop rig sail arrangement made it more stable than the one built in 1948.
The custom board Drake engineered required a greater amount of displacement volume for floatation than was found in a traditional surfboard so an extra large custom built foam blank was constructed by Gordon "Grubby" Clark of Clark foam and shaped by Jim Drake and Gary Seaman at the Con Surfboard factory in Santa Monica, California.
On May 21, 1967, Jim Drake, along with his wife Wendy and daughter Stephanie, went to Marina del Rey's Jamaica Bay to make history with the world's first modern sailboard.
Returning to Marina del Rey one week later, this time with the skeg and uphaul, Drake succeeded at sailing the board the way he designed it to be used.
With his confidence buoyed from multiple days of practice in the protected bay, Drake next took his sailboard onto the open ocean at Will Rogers State Beach in Santa Monica, California.
Schweitzer was marketing a prototype of the Baja Board in Seattle, when Bert Salisbury stopped his car to have a look, and commented: "Gee I have the perfect name for it!
Windsurfing International Inc. created a popular one-design racing class, which was influenced by the desire to provide a fleet of racers with a uniformly constructed "boat," so that rider skill, rather than equipment choice, would determine competitive results.
Windsurfing International's usurious royalty fee charges, which its competitors were forced to pay, were so high that many observers felt it needlessly limited the growth of the sport.
This led to a host of predating windsurfer-like devices being presented to courts around the world by companies disputing Windsurfing International's rights to the invention.
[47] In 1979, Schweitzer licensed[48][49] Brittany, France-based company Dufour Wing, which was later merged with Tabur Marine – the precursor of Bic Sport.
Tabur lawyers found prior art, in a local English newspaper which had published a story with a picture about Peter Chilvers, who as a young boy on Hayling Island on the south coast of England, assembled his first board combined with a sail, in 1958.
Mistral's defense hinged on the work of US inventor Newman Darby, who by 1965 conceived the "sailboard": a hand-held square rigged "kite" sail on a floating platform for recreational use.
Between the ages of ten and thirteen, from 1946 to 1949, aided by his younger brothers, he built around 20 galvanized iron canoes and hill trolleys which he equipped with sails with split bamboo booms.
Larger (100 to 140 liters) free-ride boards are capable of planing at wind speeds as low as 12 kn (6 m/s) if rigged with an adequate, well-tuned sail in the six to eight square meter range.
Most boards produced today have an expanded polystyrene foam core reinforced with a composite sandwich shell, that can include carbon fiber, kevlar, or fiberglass in a matrix of epoxy and sometimes plywood and thermoplastics.
Depending on wind conditions and the skill or intentions of the rider, at some point the sailboard will begin planing, resulting in a rapid increase in speed.
Steering is mainly achieved by changing the center of lateral resistance located along the daggerboard or fin through rotating the sail either fore and aft.
Formula boards are used on "flat water" as opposed to coastal surf, but racing is still held in windy conditions involving swell and chop.
Competitors race on a short downwind slalom course, must duck jibe on all turns, and are required to perform several tricks along the way.
The Super X discipline was short lived and is now largely unpracticed; it reached its peak in the early 2000s, Speedsailing takes place in several forms.
World Champion Jessica Crisp has had arguably the worst injury in the history of the indoor events when, during a warm up session jumping the ramp, she snapped her leg and had to have emergency surgery in a French hospital.
[67] The most famous indoor champions include Robert Teriitehau, Jessica Crisp, Robby Naish, Nick Baker, Eric Thieme, and Nathalie LeLievre.
The most famous wave riding locations on earth include: Ho'okipa on the north shore of Maui, Diamond Head on Oahu, Klitmøller in Denmark, Pozo and Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Cabo Verde off the north west coast of Africa, Moulay in Morocco, Margaret River in Western Australia, Pacasmayo in Peru, Topocalma in Chile, and Omaezaki in Japan.
Recent innovations have included combining moves whilst airborne and, for the first time in 2008, one professional sailor, Ricardo Campello, has made attempts at a triple forward loop during a 2008 PWA competition.
